Developing the skills needed for requirement elicitation in global software development

The requirement elicitation stage is that which is most critical in the development of a software product. However, this stage is not covered on teaching courses with the required depth, nor is invested the necessary time in training students and practitioners in these tasks. There is currently a trend towards global software development (GSD) which complicates the process of elicitation requirements since, for instance, communication is more difficult because stakeholders are geographically distributed. Moreover, the elicitation in GSD involves a variety of characteristics that are not often taught in software engineering courses. This paper presents some of the most important factors which may affect elicitation in GSD. Furthermore, we propose techniques with which to help students and software engineers to develop some of the skills needed to carry out the elicitation process in GSD.